ent, and
taxed him with gross dereliction of duty. He had left us to drive his
horse and cart for a whole day, and had broken, for the sake of his
wretched indulgence in the public-house, his engagement with our master;
and I would report him to a certainty. The carter turned upon me with
the fierceness of a wild beast; but, first catching his eye, as I would
that of a maniac, I set my face very near his, and he calmed down in a
moment. He could not help being late, he said: he had reached the inn at
Contin not an hour after we had left it; and it was really very hard to
have to travel a long day's journey in such bad shoes. We accepted his
apology; and, ordering the landlord to bring in half a mutchkin of
whisky, the storm blew by. The morning, like the previous night, had
been thick and rainy; but it gradually cleared up as the day rose; and
after breakfast we set out together along a broken footpath, never
before traversed by horse and cart. We passed a solitary lake, on whose
shores the only human dwelling was a dark turf shieling, at which,
however, Click-Clack ascertained there was whisky to be sold; and then
entered upon a tract of scenery wholly different in its composition and
character from that through which our journey had previously lain.

There runs along the west coast of Scotland, from the island of Rum to
the immediate neighbourhood of Cape Wrath, a formation, laid down by
Macculloch, in his Geological Map of the Kingdom, as Old Red Sandstone,
but which underlies formations deemed primary--two of these of quartz
rock, and a third of that unfossiliferous limestone in which the huge
Cave of Smoo is hollowed, and to which the Assynt marbles belong. The
system, which, taken as a whole--quartz-rock, lime, and
sandstone--corresponds bed for bed with the Lower Old Red of the east
coast, and is probably a highly metamorphic example of that great
deposit, exhibits its fullest development in Assynt, where all its four
component beds are present. In the tract on which we now entered, it
presents only two of these--the lower quartz-rock, and the underlying
red sandstone; but wherever any of its members appear, they present
unique features--marks of enormous denudation, and a bold style of
landscape altogether its own; and, in now entering upon it for the first
time, I was much impressed by its extraordinary character. Loch Maree,
one of the wildest of our Highland lakes, and at this time scarce at all
known to the